


Ghost in the Code

by vials



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Silva doesn't let a thing like death stop him from being dramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 23:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8420758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Silva's ghost is haunting MI6's computer systems, Q has no idea what to do, and James is surprisingly unbothered by hauntings.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The first of a bunch of Halloween fics I'm writing for the various fandoms I'm in. This one is kind of semi-serious, semi-humorous, which is sort of unavoidable when dealing with Silva's ghost dramatics. Happy Halloween!

Q-branch took on a strange atmosphere in the early hours of the morning, when the labs were all but deserted and Q could feel the beginnings of sleep deprivation at the edges of his mind. He sat back in his seat, rotating his wrists and flexing his fingers, blinking blearily at nothing in particular. He was alone, save for the hum of the machines around him, and only the lowlights lit the room now that most of the computers were in sleep mode. Usually he would find it almost relaxing – the warmth of the electronics combined with the white noise of their humming – but tonight, for some reason, he found himself on edge. 

It was probably the caffeine, he thought. He sometimes got like this, when he had too much and his brain was too alert to keep up with his tired body. He knew that it was probably his cue to head home, get a few hours’ sleep before he had to be back here in the morning, but his workload wouldn’t allow that and so he dragged himself to his feet instead, heading over to the side of the room to make some more tea. He leaned against the table as the kettle boiled, watching the steam rising without really seeing it, his hands working on autopilot as he fixed up the tea. He was stirring in the milk when he heard an odd click behind him, and suddenly he was aware of the fact that the room was a lot brighter.

Turning quickly around, Q found himself blinking in confusion at the sight in front of him. Every single computer monitor was now on, awoken from sleep just as surely as though someone had wiggled a mouse or swiped a finger along the touchpad. Q stood there for a long moment, trying to make sense of it, before he shook his head and turned back to his tea.

“Updates,” he told himself, without much conviction. “Probably updates, they all rebooted and I just didn’t notice.”

The words didn’t bring him any comfort, and once back at his desk, he found himself glancing up increasingly often at the glowing screens around him. Usually they would go into standby if no one used them within five minutes. Q tried to ignore the fact that half an hour later, the screens were still glowing.

*

It was easy to ignore what had happened once it was day. With a lessening workload, Q had managed to avoid late night Q-branch lately, and he would be lying if he said he wasn’t relieved. He tried not to think too much about how unnerved he had been, telling himself it was sleep deprivation and too much caffeine and absolutely not anything to take seriously. Still, it was easy to tell himself that when Q-branch was filled with noise and people, and he knew that above him, daylight was keeping anything too sinister away. The unease came back to him tenfold later that week, when he found himself alone once more, his eyes cautiously scanning the room every so often for any clue that it might happen again.

“Ridiculous,” he muttered. “How old are you?”

His words sounded too loud in the silence of the lab, and he got the uncomfortable feeling that someone else had heard them. He couldn’t explain why – all he knew was that the atmosphere had shifted slightly once he had spoken, and whatever it was felt amused. 

“Stop it,” he said to himself, quieter now. His heart was thudding in his chest and he forced himself to focus on the blueprints in front of him. He couldn’t understand what had come over him. He had never been the sort to give in to his imagination, and just as well really – the house he had lived in with his parents, before they died, had been huge and old and if anything was haunted it would have been that place. What ghost would possibly haunt MI6? They lost people all the time – agents, of course, and the occasional sudden heart attack in administration. MI6 had plenty of blood on its hands, admittedly, but Q thought that any vengeful spirit would probably do a little more than switch on some computers and laugh at him talking to himself. 

He couldn’t believe he was sitting at his desk, staring into the middle distance, genuinely thinking about ghosts. He shook his head, mentally scolding himself, and tried to focus.

Q succeeded for a while – by the time he noticed something was different, it had clearly been that way for a while. Q leaned back slowly in his seat, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk, watching in disbelief as his laptop switched through several programs at an increasingly rapid pace, finally settling on a simple notepad document. Q’s breath caught in his throat; seconds later he was struggling to make sense of what was happening as strings of numbers began rapidly appearing on the screen.

_01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111_

Q quickly noticed two things – number one, it was repeating itself, the same binary code over and over again until the document was full of it. Number two was the fact that it was utterly ridiculous to assume this was a bloody ghost. 

Q reached out and slammed his fingers down on the system lockdown shortcut.

*

“I trust there’s a good reason the entire system went down early this morning?”

It was a struggle to keep up with M’s purposeful strides when he was this exhausted, but somehow Q managed it, weaving through the hallways at his elbow as he wondered how to explain.

“Well, yes,” he said. “I don’t do it for fun, you know. It takes a while to set up again.”

“So what was it?” M asked. “I didn’t hear anything else from you. Slightly concerning.”

“I thought there was a system intrusion,” Q said, before sighing. “The only thing is, I couldn’t find anything.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. I can’t explain it. It looked like an intrusion, but none of the security measures have been tripped, none of the traps I set have brought anything up, and the system seems to be completely clean. I guess it must be a technical fault, but I have no idea where to begin looking. It’s just…”

“Just?” M asked, raising an eyebrow, and Q sighed again.

“It’s going to sound stupid,” Q said. 

“Well, I’d rather it sound stupid and be investigated than have it ignored and get worse,” M said, and Q paused for a moment.

“It’s not an intrusion,” he stressed. “It can’t be. But I don’t think it’s a glitch, either. I have no idea what it is, but it seems… smart.”

“Smart?”

“Like AI, if that makes sense. It seems intelligent enough to get the basics of what it wants to do, but doesn’t know how to carry it out properly. As far as I can tell, none of the AI software I’m working on has gotten loose, but—”

M had stopped, turning to look at him, and Q stopped a half pace in front of him and looked back, feeling almost sheepish.

“What makes you say it’s intelligent?” M asked warily.

“It talks,” Q said simply.

“It talks.”

“I translated the binary message.”

“And what did it say?”

“It said ‘hello’.”

*

Q wasn’t ashamed to admit he worked from home the next time he realised his workload wouldn’t fit into the regular day. Looking back, he realised he was probably a fool for being so relaxed just because he was at home. Things progressed normally for the first hour, and then his laptop froze and absolutely refused to listen to him.

“It has to be a glitch,” he said to his cats, as he struggled to get the laptop to do anything – even a force shutdown wasn’t working. “It’s the only possible explanation. I have my laptop connected to pretty much everything at work. Of course if mine started acting up, weird things would happen.”

One of his cats looked up and yawned at him. The other stayed fast asleep.

“Oh, bloody _hell_ ,” Q burst out, tapping the laptop firmly with a finger. “Come on. I built you. I raised you since birth. Is this how you repay me?”

He tapped the laptop again, and this time, something happened. The notepad document popped up again, another message appearing simultaneously on the bright white background.

_b3VjaA==_

Q blinked, and then quickly grabbed his phone, tapping the characters into his preferred translator. 

“base64, at least a little more original than binary,” he said, because snarking was really all he had left now. He looked at the translated message and then back up at his laptop, raising an eyebrow. “’Ouch’? Come on, I didn’t hit you that hard.”

His heart was thudding in his chest, some part of his brain refusing to believe this was happening, but at the same time this seemed to be the only way he was going to get answers – something that Q was desperate for at this point. He was still struggling to think about what kind of glitch this could be, growing ever more paranoid that it was some bored hacker who had decided to fuck with him, but surely if that was the case they would have done more damage by now? Surely they would have realised what kind of system they had got into and done _something_ – backed off, maybe, out of fear of arrest, or stolen whatever information they could find, or simply gutted the system. It didn’t fit any hacker MO that Q knew of, and besides, his laptop was as impenetrable as a laptop was going to get. His systems were all but uncrackable. Only one person had managed it before, and he was dead.

Q felt his stomach drop. He looked back at the laptop, stricken, wanting to be wrong, wanting to know for sure that this was too ridiculous to be true but knowing instinctively that there was no other way.

“Dead,” he said, quietly, because that was the only part of his thought process he could articulate.

There was a pause, and then the previous message deleted itself and a new one appeared, this time in plain text.

_clever boy_

*

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Q nearly jumped out of his skin as James seemed to materialise in front of his desk, sporting a nasty black eye and holding what was left of some of Q’s prototypes. He dropped them on the desk with a clatter that make Q shiver, before taking a half step back and looking at him properly.

“Christ,” he said. “You really _do_ look rough.”

“Thank you for your input,” Q said, wearily reaching out to inspect what was left of James’s modified smart phone. “And how exactly did you so thoroughly destroy this?”

“It might have stopped a bullet for me. Thank you, Q.”

Q stared at him for a long moment, sincerely wanting to chew him out but finding he didn’t have the energy. For the first time, he saw James look almost concerned.

“What?” Q asked, when James did nothing but stare at him.

“Are you alright? Usually you have more to say to me over destroyed equipment.”

“I’ve been busy lately,” Q said, hoping to sound more casual about the whole thing than he felt. “Sometimes, Bond, I feel as though lecturing you is like banging my head off a brick wall. Other times, I think you kind of enjoy it. No lecture this time. Maybe if you don’t get any attention for it, you’ll stop doing it.”

James smiled, amused, but Q could tell he wasn’t quite falling for it. They stared at one another for a long moment, Q no longer bothering to hide the fact he was chewing on his lip. Finally, he glanced up at James again, sighing.

“If I ask you a stupid question, will you promise not to tell anyone I asked?”

James raised an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose that depends entirely on what it is. I don’t think any question you ask could be described as stupid.”

“You’d be surprised,” Q said grimly. “Silva. He’s definitely dead?”

James looked at him for several seconds, and Q tried to work out what he was thinking. Maybe he knew something Q didn’t, and this whole mess could be easily explained. Or maybe he thought Q had finally gone off his rocker. Q couldn’t exactly blame him for that.

“Why do you ask?” James asked cautiously, and Q fought the urge to slump back in his chair. It was precisely the question that he hadn’t wanted to hear.

“I just want to know,” he said, not bothering to disguise how evasive he sounded. “He definitely died, right?”

“Yes,” James said, and Q could feel him continuing to search his face for clues. “He’s dead. There’s an autopsy report and everything, if you care to look.”

“OK,” Q said weakly. “Well. That complicates things.”

*

Q-branch was dark again, and Q was hurriedly working through the last of the day’s work in the hope that he would be able to get the hell out of the place before anything strange happened. As much as he wanted to pretend that this was all a figment of his imagination, he found himself unable to. It was all completely illogical, of course, not to mention utterly ridiculous, but unfortunately for him it was also undeniable. Q was not qualified by any means to deal with ghosts in a computer system. It was perhaps the only problem he had come across that he didn’t know how to fix.

Q hurried back and forth, putting folders back in the correct places and filing away loose bits of paperwork. He kept his eyes averted from the computer screen, terrified of what he would see if he looked for too long. It was a difficult task, considering the amount of computers in the lab; walking in the space between rows, Q got the feeling that there were eyes on him, as though every computer shared the same unnerving quality as those old portraits with seemingly moving eyes. 

He reached the end of the row and slid a folder back into its place on the shelf, and in the second before he turned around, he felt a distinct chill creep up his spine. Taking a deep breath, Q turned slowly, looking up the row of computers and seeing that they were shutting off, one by one, towards him. He wanted to swear, or to run, or to do _something_ , but his feet were frozen to the spot and all he could do was stand there. The last set of computers switched themselves off, and as they did, the rest of the lights in the room followed them. The emergency lights didn’t kick in. Q was left in total darkness.

The silence around him was broken only by his ragged breathing. He stared ahead with wide eyes but there wasn’t a single source of light in the room for him to work with. Unable to see anything, the rest of Q’s senses seemed to be working ten times as hard; he was aware of every slight change in air movement, every prickle of his skin. Q tried to focus on the ground under his feet in an attempt to remind himself that he was actually standing in a room and not floating through complete nothingness. He continued to stare straight ahead even though he couldn’t see anything, hearing the blood rushing through his ears.

The silence seemed to last forever – long enough that, slowly, frustration began to seep through Q’s fear. He took a steadying breath, and forced himself to speak.

“Stop it.”

His words bounced back at him through the darkness, and Q felt something in the atmosphere shift. Whatever was there, it was listening.

“Turn the lights back on,” Q said, gaining some strength from hearing his voice. “This is ridiculous. You’re dead. You need to go away.”

At the end of the row of computers, he saw the first two flicker to life. It was a relief to have some light to focus on, though the glow from the screens threw the shadows into strange patterns and Q became all too aware of the darkness pressing at the edges of the light, hiding god knows what. He swallowed, wet his lips, and forced himself to speak again.

“You’re dead,” he repeated. “You can’t do anything to me now. You’re not meant to be here.”

Again, Q felt that odd amused atmosphere that he remembered from when this had started; in the same moment, for the briefest of split seconds, he was sure he smelled gas. He felt his chest tighten, his breaths becoming short – surely that was impossible? But Silva had done it once, in what was essentially the same way. Intruding into the system, overriding the controls and setting them to do what he wanted instead. What was to say he couldn’t do it again? He had proven that whatever state he was in now, he was able to manipulate the computers. How did Q know he wasn’t capable of moving through the systems and changing whatever he wanted?

“You wouldn’t,” Q eventually said, but he could hear his voice was unsteady. “Your problem isn’t with me, is it?”

The screens switched themselves on rapidly, approaching Q with enough speed that his anxiety threatened to overwhelm him, and then they reached him and the overhead lights came back on and Q was left standing there in the sudden glaring brightness, his heart in his throat, his head pounding.

*

He told himself he would leave immediately after, once his eyes had stopped aching from the lights and he could finally move his feet. Q walked quickly back to his laptop, closing the lid over without even looking at the screen, and he was in the process of shoving it into his bag when he heard footsteps echoing down the hall towards him.

He froze again, suddenly possessed with the undignified urge to hide. Instead, he slowly forced himself to move, straightening his back and turning slightly to face the door. It opened slowly, and for a moment he couldn’t tell who or what might be on the other side.

Then there was movement, and James stepped into the light, and Q didn’t think he had ever been so relieved to see him.

“Everything alright down here?” James asked, glancing around, and Q thought he looked tense.

“Everything’s – um, fine, now,” Q said hurriedly. “I was just on my way out, actually, um, what are you doing down here again?”

“I was finishing some things up,” James said, still looking around. “But then would you believe the computer started doing all kind of strange things? I thought I better let you know, in case it’s a glitch.”

“Oh, yes, well, that’s been happening lately,” Q said, hearing that he was still speaking too fast. He tried to force himself to slow down, but it was no use. “I have no idea what’s going on, actually, though I’m working on it. It’s nothing serious, just… some freezing and glitching.”

“And messages popping up of their own accord?” James asked, finally looking at Q, who froze again, guilty. 

“And a bit of that, I suppose,” he admitted. He frowned, and then a thought occurred to him and he looked back up at James with something that might be hope. “You’ve seen them too?”

“Just now,” James said. “Only the once.”

“Well, that’s good enough for me,” Q said, breathing a sudden sigh of relief. “I thought I was going insane.”

“I wouldn’t celebrate too soon, Q,” James said. “I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t take much to guess, after what you asked me the other day. Forgive me if I’m stepping out of line, but don’t you think you should consider other options before assuming that Silva’s ghost is loose in your system?”

Q blinked, taking a moment before he replied. 

“I suppose it all sounds a bit far-fetched when you put it that way,” he said, before he looked back at James with a hint of defiance. “I have considered other options. I’ve looked at everything, and I’ve found no evidence of intrusions, glitches, pranks, or any combination of those options. My systems are highly secure, and so far, Silva has been the only one to ever crack them. If, by some chance, someone _had_ got in, it would have to be someone with knowledge of what happened with Silva. There had been things I can’t explain that only Silva would know. If we go even further into the realm of possibility, say it was someone who did know about him and could get into the system somehow – they would have to work here, and I’ve been monitoring absolutely everyone since it started. I can’t explain what’s going on in any other way, as utterly impossible as this all sounds. Plus…” Q trailed off for a moment, chewing his lip before forcing himself to just say it. “It _feels_ like him.”

Q hadn’t expected that to make much sense; James’s reaction surprised him. The other man looked suddenly grim, and he sounded resigned when he spoke.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It does.”

*

Q didn’t have to ask, but James seemed to pick up on it all the same – he stayed with Q as Q finished up some final things, staying by the doorway and keeping an eye on the various screens and monitors. Neither of them had spoken since their earlier conversation; Q got the feeling that they were both wondering where to go from there. Admitting it was going to be the easy part, really. Q had no idea what the protocol was for something like this, and if the disruptions continued, he was soon going to find himself trying to explain the whole mess to M.

“When did it start?” James eventually asked, and Q shook his head.

“About two weeks ago,” he said. “I thought it was just… well, you know. I didn’t think it was a bloody ghost, that’s for sure.”

“He’ll only get worse,” James said grimly, and Q remembered the smell of gas and shivered.

“I don’t know what he wants,” he said. “He got what he wanted, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” James said, and there was something on his face that Q wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. “But one thing’s for sure, and that’s that he doesn’t seem like the type of person who would just move on.”

Q snorted. “Really, we should have expected this. All I want to know is why he seems to be targeting me.”

“Maybe he isn’t,” James shrugged. “I mean, computers are his thing, and you just happen to be the one who’s always around them. Perhaps it’s a coincidence.”

“I hope so,” Q admitted. “But that leaves the question of who he’s actually after—”

The soft hiss might have well been ten times louder with how immediately James and Q tuned in to it. Q looked over James’s shoulder as the other man turned to see the door behind him had clicked closed and locked with the hiss they had just heard; trying it, James confirmed that it was firmly shut.

“Brilliant,” James said, and Q pushed his glasses up his nose slightly so he could pinch his fingers there and try to think for a moment. “I suppose it’ll be useless for you to try and override the controls?” 

“Of course it will be,” Q said, letting his glasses slip back into place. He was possessed with the urge to just sit on the floor. Maybe Silva would get bored if they simply refused to play. “As unnerving as this whole thing is, I’m getting rather annoyed now.”

“It’s not quite like in the horror movies, is it?” James asked, jiggling the door again before shrugging and turning back to Q. “So, what now? Are we going to be murdered, or is he going to go for a more classic haunting with some floating objects and writing on the wall?”

“I imagine the lights will shut off,” Q said, just as they did so. “Ah. There we go.”

“He’s done this before, I take it?” James asked, his voice sounding odd as it floated through the darkness towards Q.

“Just earlier, actually,” Q said, and his heart kicked up pace at the memory. He took a steadying breath, trying to gain some comfort from the fact that he at least had company this time. “I had a bit of a go at him, if I’m honest.”

“You might want to try that again,” James said, laughing, and Q felt his way over to his desk, fumbling around in his bag for his laptop. To his surprise, it booted up as normal when he opened the lid, allowing James to move through the room towards the light.

“He doesn’t seem to be doing anything right now,” Q said. “I’ll try and see if I can do anything with the lights – no, predictably I’m locked out of that.”

“Maybe you should shut off the gas,” James said casually, and Q felt himself shiver again.

“I don’t think I’d be able to,” he said. “And besides, I wouldn’t want to give him ideas.”

“I’m sure he’s already got plenty of ideas,” James said, turning and leaning against the table. “I just hope he bloody hurries up about it. He can really take his time sometimes.”

“A flair for the dramatics is always appreciated in a haunting,” Q said, and he had the sudden urge to giggle. “So, what do we do? Call a priest?”

James snorted. “I don’t think so. The last I checked, religious symbolism didn’t do him that much good last time. Maybe—”

A sudden flash of light and the sound of glass shattering cut him off; both Q and James looked up, startled, in time to see the last of the lights above them blow out. Sparks floated towards the ground, vanishing before they hit it, accompanied by the sound of broken glass scattering on the floor. Q glanced at James through the glow of his screen; the other man was still looking at the ceiling, frowning.

“Guess he didn’t appreciate that comment,” Q said weakly.

“Well, it’s bloody true,” James said, frustration creeping into his voice. 

“Listen,” Q said hurriedly, before James inevitably caused something else to go horribly wrong. “I’ve never been one to believe in this kind of thing but I did enjoy a good ghost story when I was younger, and there’s usually two major reasons why ghosts hang about. The first is that they don’t realise they’re dead—”

“Oh, he knew he was dead alright.”

“—and the second is unfinished business. They’re looking for someone or something, like justice of vengeance or something like that, and from what we know about Silva –”

“I don’t think it’s vengeance,” James said, and Q looked at him, raising an eyebrow as he waited for elaboration. “He got what he thought he wanted,” James added. “And I think that’s the problem here.”

“‘What he thought he wanted’?” Q repeated. “I thought it was pretty clear what he wanted.”

“Well, there’s a big difference between imagining it and getting it,” James said, pushing himself away from the desk and stepping around it instead, squinting up at the burnt out light. “I think he truly wanted M dead, right up until when he saw she was dying. How do you come to terms with dying in the knowledge that what you worked for for fifteen years wasn’t actually what you wanted?”

“So what did he want?” Q asked, glancing down at his laptop screen because by this point he was sure he would see someone watching him through it. “If not that?”

“I think he just wanted none of it to have ever happened,” James said simply. “I think he wanted it to all go away. Go back in time, have none of it be an issue in the first place. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened.” He glanced around again, and when he spoke he had raised his voice only slightly, though in the silence of the rest of the room he may as well have been yelling. “Did you hear me? That isn’t what happened. That’s not possible, and now it’s over. You’re dead. So is she. Game’s over.”

Q found himself sinking down into his chair, his legs suddenly weak. He wanted to hide, knowing no good would come of this, but instead he forced himself to reach out and power his laptop off. Whatever happened, he didn’t want it connected to any of the systems. 

The darkness of the room lasted only a few seconds before the rest of the computers came to life, though they didn’t stay solid. They were flickering so fast that Q found his head was beginning to ache again; he distracted himself by glancing around in the flashes of light, trying to see if he could spot any clues as to what might happen next. James seemed predictably unbothered. 

“Give it up,” he said, and there was an undertone of anger in his voice that Q knew wouldn’t lead to anything being settled peacefully. “I don’t know what’s got you this time – anger or regret or whatever it is – but there’s nothing to do about it now. You had fifteen bloody years to consider that it was maybe a bad idea. Hell, you could have probably come back any time and she would have welcomed you. Instead you chose to do what you did, and now you’re both dead. Maybe find her wherever the hell you are and take it up there, if this wasn’t good enough for you. But you have to leave.”

For a moment it looked as though it might have worked. The screens went blank, the room became dark and silent. All Q could hear was he and James’s breathing, and as much as he wanted to pretend it was over, he knew better than to relax. It didn’t take long for him to realise he was right.

“Do you smell that?” he whispered, and there was a pause before James answered.

“Something’s burning,” he said. 

“Do you see anything?” Q asked, swivelling around to try and spot any sign of flames. “He’s done this before, it’s just been a smell but there was nothing actually there – hopefully that’s the case now.”

“I don’t think so,” James said warily. “Not his style.”

Q stood up on shaky feet, following his nose as the acrid smell of smoke grew stronger. He had smelled it enough in the labs, when things had sparked before they should and melted some plastic or table surface, but it was far more than just a little patch this time. It was getting stronger, despite the fact that Q still couldn’t see any flames. 

“We should get out of here,” he said, taking a few steps back, but before James could answer, Q finally spotted where the problem was. He noticed in the same moment as one of the plastic panels on the wall finally melted and collapsed backwards, resulting in a sudden rush of flame that only just missed where Q was standing. He felt the heat on his face as it passed, making his eyes sting, and the room was suddenly rapidly filling with the black smoke he had been smelling.

“Oh, shit,” he said, sounding oddly calm as he saw the extent of the flames behind where the panel had been. “The arsehole has fried all my bloody servers!”

He felt oddly unconcerned as he hurried across the room and grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher – maybe it was relief that something had finally happened, he didn’t know, but considering they were locked in a room with what was quickly becoming an inferno, he thought he would feel a lot worse. Getting as close to the flames as he dared, he pulled the pin and aimed the hose at the flames, joined a few second later by James with his own extinguisher. Q hadn’t expected it to do much good – some of the flames were ceiling height by this point – but strangely the fire seemed to recede almost immediately. By the time they had emptied the extinguishers, there was no sign of any flames; just the smoke hanging thick in the air. 

The emergency lights had come back on at some point, and Q squinted through the surreal glow they bathed the room in. A few of the servers were write-offs, but considering the extent of the flames, relatively little damage had been done. He glanced at James, who was wearing a similar confused expression. 

“We should think of a cover story,” Q said eventually.

James nodded. “Probably a good idea.”

*

“Hold on a moment,” M said, pressing his fingers to his temples for a moment before looking across the desk at Q. “ _How_ did the fire start again?”

“There was some kind of glitch in the system,” Q explained patiently. “It caused a lot of extra traffic on the servers, which stressed them to the point of overheating. A separate and unrelated problem resulted in the fans in the server room malfunctioning, and some of the plastic components in the server equipment began to melt and eventually caught fire. The fire was small but intense, and melted through the side panelling and alerted myself and Bond, who was there to report more problems with the computers caused by the initial glitch. The whole thing made a right mess of the electrics, shorting out the lights on the entire floor and playing havoc with computers connected to the internal system. It should be fixed once I get the servers back up and running again.”

M stared at him for a long moment, and Q only hoped that his lying was either good enough to fool him, or that M would ultimately decide that he didn’t want to know the actual story.

“Well, I suppose it’s a good job the two of you were down there,” he eventually said, and Q nodded, hoping he didn’t look too relieved.

“It would have been quite a mess if we hadn’t been,” he said. “Thankfully, most of the damage was contained. Only a few of the servers are total losses, and the rest can probably be salvaged. The majority of them escaped damage.”

They stared at one another for a long moment before M gave a curt nod, shuffled some papers, and finally looked up at Q.

“One more question, Q,” he said, and Q looked back at him, hoping he was hiding his nerves.

“Yes?”

“Could this glitch have caused the computer to tell you ‘hello’?”

Q managed to keep a neutral face.

“Stranger things have happened, sir.”


End file.
